Transcripts of Brenda Brueggemann
Yeah, and I think that, I think one of the things that's happening, I still want to write about this. With the cochlear implant technology, is it's making it's making... People realize that. Not only deaf and hard-of-hearing people, but audiologists themselves, and other doctors. They kind of knew, but it hadn't been studied. The way in which you have to learn to hear, that we take for granted. That, and that hearing's in context, it's like a language in and of itself. I mean they know that, they know that people don't hear all the same. Which is part of like when students, it's always students are fascinated. The first thing they want to say "Well music, how do you hear music?" And I always say back, "Well how do you hear music?" (laughs). They can't answer it, you know, but it's the same thing with me, I do hear music. I know that there are some parts of it I don't hear, violins for example, but I hear things about music. I joke that I like country-western music because the lyrics are simple and they're always the same, you know.
But it's true, I mean and part of it's really true, there's always a narrative to a country and western song. And so that's kind of easy, to get, and understand. But hearing is very much, so with cochlear implants what's happening is that there's this thing that happens after you're fitted with an implant called mapping And the mapping goes on, once someone has an implant, forever. Because as the person who has been implanted learns to re-hear, their map keeps changing. And there are things they want, you know, they keep coming back to the clinic. And it's just a really fascinating, that Micheal Cohorst, who I know is one of Cindy's students as a PHD, has the best description I've ever read of the mapping process. And that's what's fascinating about it because he's really has tuned into how, how we learn hearing. And I think it's one of those things that we all learn to do. We just don't realize we're learning it. Well can you, then, let's continue with the education part. And talk about maybe, after you, where you proceeded from your small Kansas school, and... Well things were hunky-dory out in Western Kansas, for a long time. Really, I say I was mainstreamed in the time before mainstreaming became official, because and I make a joke of it but it's not really a joke, it's really true. That in a place like Tribune, Kansas, everyone was mainstreamed. Because that was the only way the community could survive.
When you're a town small enough you're playing eight man football, that meant that in order for a football game to happen, I might have to play football on the team and then cheerlead on the sidelines and also do the band. And I remember that, that everyone, you know, I was in band, because everyone was in band. Because that was the only way we were going to have a band. Because the place was so small. And so that meant that everyone fit in, for their differences, a very kind of tight-knit community. And everyone in town knew that I was hard-of-hearing, or that my hearing was not so good. Deaf was not a word that we would use, at that time And not only that ironically, but the girl right next door to me, who was, 10, 11 years younger than me, was Deaf like I was. And when I went back to teach High School there. I started my teaching career back in Tribune, Kansas, she was my student. And she will tell the same story as well. So things were hunky-dory in Tribune, Kansas, you know I sat front and center. I had a best friend who's just as smart as I was, and I would always look over at her notes and double-check. But you know my High School was not very challenging. I mean it was good, it was fine, serviceable. But I ended up reading and doing a lot of things all additionally myself.
There's a story I tell that's the kind of literacy narrative moment. I was in Eighth Grade and I was an Eighth Grade cheerleader, and after a football game, there in the late, early-late afternoon for the Junior High, so there was a Junior High football game. And after the football game was finished, all of my friends wanted to go down to the drugstore downtown and cram together in the noisy little booth, and have our cokes and ice cream. And I was in the middle of reading Thomas Hardy's "Far From the Madding Crowd". And I was just utterly immersed in the book, in fact my mother the night before had come and yanked the book away from me under the covers reading and made me go to sleep. So I wanted to go home and read this book, and finish it. Because my parents didn't come home til like five or six, and the house is all peaceful and quiet, and it's just me. I didn't really want to go down to the noisy drugstore, with my friends. So I told my friends I was grounded. So I couldn't go to the drugstore with them. And I went home, and I sat on the couch lounged out on the couch, reading Thomas Hardy's "Far From the Madding Crowd" which is kind of appropriate right, for the situation. And then I heard, sensed this movement in the house. My sister, Barb, who was a year younger than me had brought all my friends into the house, and they were hiding in the kitchen and they were laughing at me, she was pointing out to them that I wasn't grounded, that the nerd was reading the book instead of choosing to be with them. And that was, that was who I was. No mercy. Right, no mercy (laughing). Well talk about, then what happened when you, you went to High School and then, where? So things were hunky dory and then part two of the story emerges.
So then I go off to the University of Kansas, and I was so afraid, my whole freshman year. It's almost, it's almost humorous to think about it, now. Although at the time it wasn't, it was really really painful. So I'm a freshman living in the dorms in a dorm with like two hundred and fifty other girls. Between when I started college and went back home at Thanksgiving, which was the first time I went back home, because it was seven and a half hours across the state, I lost twenty pounds, and I wasn't really that heavy to begin with. You know I was just rail thin. Because I was scared to death to go down to the cafeteria, and engage in the social interaction with a whole bunch of strangers that I didn't know. And what's funny about this, it's not funny, actually it's painful, but at the time I didn't realize how much that was about my hearing. At the time I really thought it was mostly about being a very small Western Kansas girl, you know and some of these girls were from Kansas City and Saint Louis, and you know they knew their way around the world.
And it was only Lawrence, Kansas, which if you've ever been there it's pretty small. But I was also afraid, I had a car, but I was afraid to drive out also and find food anywhere. Because I was afraid I would get lost in Western Kansas. I mean in Lawrence, Kansas. I know! It's really funny... Then, you know, I would go to my, and I was a Psych major to begin with, and over the summer before I had gone to college I got, someone gave me, who had been to college, an intro to Psych textbook. And I lifeguarded all summer at the city pool, outdoors. And during the breaks or in the time I had to be in the basket room, the entry room, take your turn there, all summer I read that intro to Psych textbook. What a geek I am. (laughing), I know you're laughing but it's just... You are a geek (more laughing). I went to college and like, you know the small class like the writing class was just fine, I remember being very comfortable, and it was writing and the class was small and I'd go to this intro to Psych, lecture hall, and I would always get there early so I could go front row and center, and sit right down there right up under the professor's nose, in the big lecture hall. And then I had that textbook, and I had the one I had borrowed over the summer, and then I got another one, from the library, that was all intro to Psych. They were three different intro to Psych textbooks. And I read all three of them, and I wrote notes on all three of them, in three different notebooks. Developed a glossary, it's kind of like what Jane Fernandez was describing, and cross-referenced them all.
And this is what I did, day and night, and day and night, in all of my classes, this sort of double time preparation. Well by the end of that year I had figured out though that one did not need to study so hard, (laughing). That you could get by. And I had no social life, my freshman year it was really just all that, and then things got better after that. Once I sort of adapted. I also took a job in college as a lifeguard, again. And it was the perfect job because lifeguards does not require hearing, although some people think it does. But it really doesn't, it just requires a lot of visual vigilance. And I could sit there up in my quiet lifeguards chair and not be bothered or have to socially interact with people. So it was the perfect kind of job, for me. But it was it was really frightening. Did you turn into a party animal the next year? Yes I did, yeah I did. Can you talk about it? And it really was it was like a pendulum swing, so then I kind of over... So my sophomore year literally I probably gained thirty pounds, that twenty plus another ten back, and it really was mostly from too much pizza and too much beer. Then I went kind of in the whole other direction. Then my Junior year was the kind of evening out, and my Senior year was another really deeply geek year as I prepared to go off to graduate school.
I had a best friend in college who was in my dorm, living down the hall. She was from Kansas City, and of course they all knew, the people who were close to me after a while. I would say that, that I don't hear so well but nothing would really be made of it. One interesting thing is that Kate, ended up, her daughter, her youngest daughter is deaf. Mostly from birth complication a lot of difficulty with the birth. And so, cerebral palsy and some deafness that goes along with... Hard-of-hearing, she does have some hearing. And it's so funny, Kate and I reunited a couple of years ago, actually when I started at Gallaudet, because Kate had moved to go to the Washington D.C. area, so that her daughter Mallory could get the best kind of bilingual, bicultural education. It's one of the best areas for that. And her daughter Mallory is a Senior right now. So we've been in a lot of contact. She sort of saw my name on the Board of Trustees, then remembered, connected back with me. And like she said was like remembering, "Oh yeah, right, and my best friend in college was deaf too." I had been to her wedding twenty-five years ago. Well it was so funny when we got back together, as Kate said, "You know, your voice wasn't deaf, back then but it is now." And I said, no Kate, in fact my voice was probably more deaf then than it is now, because I've really trained hard as a teacher, it's just that you now have a deaf daughter, so you recognize it as a Deaf voice.
Well, talk about your reading, so from Senior year on, how did your literacy figure in, or your attention to literacy, commitment to literacy, figure into your graduate studies, where you went.
Well I thought I was going to go into graduate school in Psychology. I was majoring in Psychology, and an Honors student in Psychology. And I had taken, you know the GRE in Psyche, the general GRE and then the Psych GRE, and I had been accepted at SUNY, and Buffalo, they had a special program in creative, creativity studies, that had just developed, and I was fascinated with what makes people creative, how they become creative, given other things. So my Senior Honors thesis was actually about that. But all along, I always took English classes, and I did every English, the writing workshop class, I could take, especially. But I took a lot of the literature ones too, and a ton of German classes, as well. I had tried French and Spanish, I started out with those. I didn't want anything to do with German, because my parents and grandparents, I had internalized the way they interacted with it, and they were ashamed, of their German. And so I had kind of internalized that I guess. I wanted to avoid German, I wanted to do French and Spanish, those were cool languages, and I couldn't do them. I spent about three weeks in each one of the classes and those languages are so fluid, so soft, so liquid. I was utterly lost. So I tried German, because I had a little bit of familiarity with it already. And it's such a harsh, ugly language, you know. And it's so, you know, the lips, I mean it's entirely different, the sounds and stuff too. And I had a really good German teacher, who was a TA, let me come to her office hours and would literally kind of perform a German speech therapy on me. And you know very closely mouth to me where the sounds were coming from, so I could learn to speak it.
But I was never skilled, and I'm still, still even when I go to Germany, I can write and read German very well, but I'm always a little shy about speaking it, because I'm aware that my accent is off. So those are some other literacy narratives. But you know again, I said freshman year that writing was the way I could make up for whatever I didn't hear, and I took a lot of literature classes simply for enjoyment because that was what I liked. And I loved to write. And by my Senior year a professor that I had, who I'd had in two classes, said something to me at the end of class, about being an English major, he thought I already was an English major, because I'd had him in two classes. And I did really well, in these classes. And I said "No, I'm a Psych major." And he said "What?" And then we realized, I went and sat in his office, and did some advising, that I was only like a class or two away from actually having everything I needed for a major, in English as well. And then they minor in German. I actually got my teaching certificate in German. So it took me one more, I had to stay for one more semester. I ended up with two degrees, then the minor in German and the teaching certificate, in German. And I had been accepted to graduate school, at SUNY Buffalo, but decided, you know once I thought about it, you know Psych was fine, and I was interested in and fascinated with people and the other thing. But really I had always been happier in English classrooms.
And so you went to Louisville?
Then, no, well that was a while. No, first what I did is, the moment upon graduating from High School, I mean from College, I got married. To an old high school sweetheart. And, you know, where I come from everyone gets, really gets married right after High School. Especially back in those days. And I had already held off for four years, so I was, you know, headed towards spinsterhood, already. I remember my Grandmother was concerned. And you know there had been my high school sweetheart, and he had always been there, through the years he actually went to K-State, and I went to KU. And we had been on again and off again, So, that was just the thing to do, at that point. But I think back, and it was very uncanny, and his, his family owned the John Deere business in town. And that was what he had gone back to school... He was eight years older than me, actually, and had come back from mommy's He'd gone back to school to get his business degree, so he could go run the family business. The John Deere business. And so that's what we were going to do we were going to go back to my hometown, and I was going to teach. Well I don't know how or why, but I realized that once I went back to Tribune, I might never ever be leaving there again, and I really loved school and college. So I made a bargain with him and said :"I will go back there, and teach, but we're not going back there until I get my Master's degree." So I need to stay for two more years. And so he worked in Topeka Kansas, and we lived there. And then I drove over to KU and worked on my Master's degree in education, in English education. At that time.
And then I went back home to Western Kansas and I was just utterly miserable. And I wasn't so much miserable. It really wasn't even just the... I mean he was a wonderful person, but I was bored. And there was no one to talk about books with, and reading, and writing. I remember I formed, myself, a friends of the library association, In town, because I wanted, you know, these kinds of things to do. And what I had is the High School students. And actually once I went in the classroom and shut the door, and it was, I was just, I really like teaching, and when, and these are students who, again in Kansas hadn't been challenged a lot. You know, new things hadn't been given to them. So I worked really hard to do that. And it was kind of like a romance even, in that sense, but that was who I had, was Sophomores and Juniors in High School. And so after five years I got divorced and went back to graduate school.
Was it during that period that you were working as a journalist as well, or...
Oh yeah, freelance writer, (chuckling). I'm interested in how this narrative moves into work, and some of the ways that I know it connects back to technologies that have helped with career and work, or hurt it, or hurt.
Was that when you were doing that? As a journalist or... freelance writer for newspapers?
Yeah, very much so. That's right I started when I went back, because first I had to get into a teaching job. So I was teaching part time a German class actually, at the town twenty miles away. I started teaching German, for them. Because you know again in Western Kansas, until somebody dies on the teaching staff, there are no open positions, and we'd gone back there. So I started in German, but I started working for the newspaper, the local Greely County Republican, and that was another Romance. The man who ran the newspaper, had already been, by the time I went there he had already been doing it for about twenty-five years. And I kind of took over a lot of the paper, and he faded. And he wanted me to take the paper. And I probably would have done that, except that I could see that Otto himself wasn't probably going to die for another twenty-five years and he would never leave the paper alone.
So he wanted me to take over, but I wouldn't be taking over. Which is nothing against him, but I could see the kind of situation it would be in. So it would be my paper editing, but always Otto right over my shoulder. Bless his soul. And the little taste of teaching, I had had, I really liked teaching, so it was a kind of turn. The newspaper was fun, then when I did start High School, I took, I did the school newspaper and the yearbook. Was also one of my roles. So teaching Sophomore or Junior literature, and German, two classes of German, and then the newspaper and yearbook. So what took you back to graduate school the second time? Well after the divorce I actually went to one other school outside of Wichita, Kansas. And I was already fairly certain when I took that job at Winfield, Kansas, that I really wanted to go back to graduate school, but I wasn't sure whether it was the divorce, or Tribune, or what it was that was unsettling in me, but the year at Winfield made it, because when I was at Winfield I drove into Wichita at Wichita State, and took a class there each semester. Again writing class, and that's when I said yes, this definitely is what I want to do. So I applied back to the University of Kansas, again.
The first Master's I had was Master's in English education, so I applied back though to enter the English, the literature program well. And while there that first year I met someone, Amy Devitt, in the field, who had just started, and was doing this thing, called composition and rhetoric was her field. And it was just a marriage made in heaven. Because it was all about writing and teaching writing, and you know it could be both critical, but composition oriented it was very oriented over teaching itself, which I really love to do. And one needed to have still the skills and training in literature. So Amy says to me, she said :"Great, but you know past the one class I teach, you can't do anything with this here at Kansas." So that's when I ended up looking around, she helped me look around for other schools and I went off to Louisville to do the PHD there. When we talked to Jane Fernandez, she said that she really liked her Blackberry, and she really liked communicating via computer because it provided an increasing a level playing field, where she could communicate with other people, and her deafness wasn't... Wasn't evident. Absolutely, yeah. Does that work for you, does that metaphor work for you? Can you talk about it? Yeah absolutely. So this is the computer literacy. Computer is just a remarkable tool, for me. People will say all the time that no one writes longer e-mails, than Brenda does. And it's true and it's because, it's... I'm a very fast typer also, and it's just fluid for me. That kind of, writing has always just been pretty easy for me to do. And that fluidity of communication, I don't ever feel inhibited in any way, in e-mail. So and it does, I mean it creates a kind of level playing field. The same thing with the Blackberry, which I don't currently own, I did for a while, and I literally because of everything that happened with Gallaudet, the communication through the Blackberry was so intense and so, actually troubling, that it's right now, it's kind of like a psychological thing. And I know I'll come back to it, I've been thinking about it in fact in fact this evening we're going out to Easton because my daughter's phone needs repaired and I'm thinking about getting a Blackberry.
Again, I'm about ready to come back. Because I've begun to kind of miss it. There was that ease, because in that way it's like a phone. So I instead, I text message, just the regular phone, with my kids, and stuff. I can hear them on the phone mostly enough just to tell them what they need to do, and pick up basic details. I can't do long conversations or anything like that, on the phone. So there's a lot of text messaging, so I'm thinking about the, going back to the Blackberry again. Because the Blackberry is again one of those really cool technology things, where so many people have them, so you're not different than other hearing people, it really does make you equal and just like them, everyone else is standing around in the airport on their Blackberries, so you don't look deaf at all, because you're using them and communicating. What an interesting notion that writing is a technology for you. Absolutely. That your, that works for you. But digital technologies amplify the technologies of writing in a way that doubles that, that literacy power for you. Exactly, exactly. What a neat, what a neat, when that synergy of them working together is very cool. Louie did we miss anything? I don't think so, I was just reviewing it. How about you Brenda? Is there anything that do you want to talk, at all, about anything that you can think of in terms of young people, the people that you teach, the students that you have now, any literacy issues that we haven't covered? There's lots we haven't covered, but is there anything you want to talk about? Because I don't want to... Jane had said that about reflecting back. I think, clearly, but this is mostly my story. That a lot of things under are under considerable shift, for Deaf and hard-of-hearing people. And they are all related to technologies, and to technologies about literacy.
So I think the next ten, twenty years are going to be really, really interesting, for Deaf and hard-of-hearing people. Even the video relay service now, which is everywhere. So it's a technology again and you can think of it as a literacy technology, that people can use. So now they have still all the writing technologies, but they also have a technology that will allow them the face-to-face communication with their language, with their own language. And whether that language is Sign Language, but also, even deaf people who don't use Sign Language will tell, as I think our first interview did, that we're primarily visual learners, that we're all aware that we process a lot, visually. So even if it were a phone but you're still speaking English, having that interface of a person, is a very important thing. You know many times throughout the Gallaudet protests, again, there is a thing that people do, like you can exchange e-mails, but finally you pick up the phone. Because if you just, the phone will just solve about you know another six dozen emails could do, having that ability. to go back and forth. So deaf people have not had that, but we do.
So many times throughout the whole issues of the protest with Gallaudet, finally you know King and I would just, what we started doing was literally every day, we would end the day around between five and six when the building got quiet and we'd get on video relay service, with each other, and that would, it would make such a difference. Not only because it would help us solve things without a hundred e-mails, and a lot really intense to make some really quick, fast decisions with communication technologies and the media, and the pressures on. So, being able to work through it and other people would like on a phone was good. But it wasn't even just that. It was also the fact that we could see each other, and seeing each other would help us both kind of calm down, and anchor again. Because there would be so much e-mail, and pager messages coming at you. Not only from the other board members, but obviously from the community, it was just an immersion of it. So the actual just seeing was again a... A technology of comfort, in some ways. We should mention on tape that you were the President of that search committee. I was the chair. The chair of that search committee. Of the search committee. And then also the chair of the board. And what year was that? This was just last year, 2006, so all of 2006. One of the things we didn't ask is when you learned ASL? Oh, yeah actually, you know that's a... Yeah, good. Because that's I think that's an important part, of the literacy narrative.